the American Dialect Society made history

. For the first time in the 125-year-old organization’s history, the recipient of its “word of the year” honor was a Twitter hashtag, 

Though the “word of the year” superlative is frivolous (not actual news, but dependable fodder ideal for quick clickbait or the brief button before the nightly news cuts to commercial), it says something about the moment’s cultural zeitgeist; in 2012, the winner was “hashtag,” while the victor for 2000 was “chad” (the election of which was spared the bedlam of its origin). #BlackLivesMatter was judged to capture the essence of America, 

, post-Michael Brown, post-Eric Garner, post-Tamir Rice.

50 years after the assassination of Malcolm X

, America again finds itself confronting the realities of race in American life. A bane of serendipity not all that surprising: racial inequality has been a constant and immutable fact of American society. There are endless differences between 1965 and 2015. Socially and culturally, the winds have shifted, and the daily lived reality of race has changed.

You can glimpse that contrast in each eras’ respective civil rights slogans. 

“We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the 1960s movement

, evokes a clear-eyed yet resolute hope — t

hings will get better, even if we can’t fully imagine that reality

. “Black Lives Matter” is both mournful and exasperated in tone — 

we haven’t made that much progress, and it is an outrage that the intrinsic value of black lives still goes unrecognized

 — yet it’s also a more overt call to action,  immediate in its demand: we need to overcome, not someday, but now.

For the freedom movement, 1965 was an inflection point. A decade of bus boycotts, sit-ins, and marches across the South finally began to produce national legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, a huge legislative victory. Yet despite legal and administrative change, the same Jim Crow holding patterns existed on the streets.

One hundred years after the end abolition of legalized slavery, the long struggle for equality and integration had made gains, but faced an entrenched white intransigence, as elected officials from governors down to local sheriffs openly defied the federal government’s laws. The civil rights movement was fissuring, largely over the efficacy of nonviolence. Increasingly large numbers of young African-Americans criticized what they saw as small fixes and legal band-aids. A process of radicalization was under way. One year later, in October of 1966, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California.

, a civil rights leader — who himself became a victim of assassination at the age of 39 — wrote to the wife of a fallen competitor and sometimes ally, a casualty of the same movement:

Mrs. Malcolm X
Faith Temple Church
Harlem
New York, New York

I was certainly saddened by the shocking and tragic assassination of your husband. While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem. He was an eloquent spokesman for his point of view and no one can honestly doubt that Malcolm had a great concern for the problems that we face as a race. While I know that this is a difficult hour for you, I am sure that God will give you the strength to endure. I will certainly be remembering you in my prayers and please know that you have my deepest sympathy. Always consider me a friend and if I can do anything to ease the heavy load that you are forced to carry at this time, please feel free to call on me.

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down in the Audubon Theatre and Ballroom on Broadway and West 165th Street in New York City, bringing an end to a life that was as complicated as it was definitive of its time.

History has portrayed the relationship between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. as contentious. They differed in every tactic to bring about social change for the majority of their professional lives. Malcolm was militant, bombastic, an advocate for the separation of black and white Americans. During an interview by Dr. Kenneth Clark in 1963, 

Malcolm X undercut King’s philosophy of nonviolence in the civil rights struggle, framing him as a stooge for the white hegemony

: “The white man pays Reverend Martin Luther King, subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless. That's what you mean by ‘nonviolent’: be defenseless. Be defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken a people into captivity: That's this American white man, and they have proved it throughout the country by the police dogs and the police clubs. A hundred years ago, they used to put on a white sheet and used bloodhounds against Negroes. Today, they've taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms; they’ve traded in the bloodhounds for police dogs, and they’re still doing the same thing.”

“Nobody could make the indictment of the white man better than him,” remembers Bob Adelman, a prolific photographer whose work in the civil rights movement brought him into close contact with both King and Malcolm X. “Malcolm’s commentary was searing.”

“A hundred years ago, they used to put on a white sheet and used bloodhounds against Negroes,” Malcolm X said in 1963. “Today, they've taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms.”

Starting first as a volunteer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Adelman went on to become one of the indispensable documentarians of the 1960s (

his photograph of King at the Lincoln Memorial during the “I Have a Dream” speech

 remains the definitive image of one of the nation’s pivotal moments).

Adelman’s first conversation with Malcolm X happened during CORE’s demonstrations to integrate the construction workforce building the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, during the summer of 1963. To effectively shut down the construction, CORE needed to bolster the picket lines with hundreds more volunteers than it had. “Malcolm was there because the press was there,” says Adelman. “He loved the press.” Although he often sought out media opportunities, Malcolm was there strictly on assignment, taking photos for Nation of Islam, according to Adelman.

At one point, Malcolm walked toward Adelman, who stood in front of the protesters on Clarkson Avenue in central Brooklyn. Malcolm pointed at the camera slung around Adelman’s chest. “What f-stop setting are you using?”

Adelman vividly remembers the conversation that initially followed, in which he discussed camera settings with the civil rights leader. After a few minutes, though, the conversation began to shift. Malcolm asked Adelman, “What do you know about the difference between traditional Islam and our movement?” While the conversation continued, Adelman could see the wheels turning in Malcolm’s head: His personal change was coming. By 1964 and '65, the militant leader was a man in transition, speaking not just to mosques, but to mixed-race audiences on the college lecture circuit, exposing major white audiences to his message for the first time. In March 1964, Malcolm X disavowed the Nation of Islam. One month later, after a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he witnessed the incredible racial diversity of his fellow Muslims, Malcolm reassessed his racial separatist views. His conversation with Adelman months earlier was ultimately less about the specifics of photography or the Brooklyn protest than about the future and Malcolm’s evolution.

Weeks later, Adelman discussed the conversation with his good friend, author Ralph Ellison. Ellison sprang up. “All these young people think Malcolm was so idealistic and pure,” Adelman recalls Ellison saying. “He still has the social mindset of “Detroit Red,’ a pimp in the shadows. If he is coming out of the shadows, he wants to know the world’s reaction. Everything is a calculation.” Adelman went on to photograph Malcolm X throughout the icon’s remaining years and beyond, even capturing photos of the shrouded leader's funeral visitation.

The murder of Malcolm X is almost Shakespearian: a leader cut down in his prime as his beliefs evolved; his death, a product of political infighting within the movement and accommodated by wilful neglect by law enforcement; his influence on the civil rights struggle growing in death far beyond what it was in life, inspiring not only the "by any means necessary" nationalism of the Black Panthers, but also King’s focus on economic justice in the final three years of his life. If Ralph Ellison was right that everything with Malcolm was a “calculation,” those calculations formed the basis of the post-1965 black freedom movement.

WEEKS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF MALCOLM X 

— and after months of groundwork by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) — on March 7, 1965, the Selma-to-Montgomery demonstrations began, an effort to prompt federal action to protect the voting rights of disenfranchised blacks throughout the South.

“Doc came [to Selma] after he won the Nobel [Peace Prize],” Adelman says of Martin Luther King. “He was invited by the local leaders there. SNCC was there for the previous two or three years trying to get blacks registered for voting.” King was not welcome by the SNCC, according to Adelman. “The organization had terrible resentment against King, they had done all the work. They gave him the nickname ‘de Lord’ and the organization felt that he was showboating.”

Adelman did not spend the whole month in Selma. He, like many others, came in and out because he wasn’t on a specific photo assignment there. Still, he ended up capturing iconic images of the marches, including a cover image for 

Adelman’s images would go on to have a profound effect on the nation and on MLK himself. “I met with Doc at an airport sometime after the marches. I gave him a picture of demonstrators being sprayed with a fire hose,” Adelman recalls, remembering that the pressure from the water was so harsh that he saw it strip the bark from trees. “Doc looks at their bodies scattering and the demonstrators linking together against the assault. He looked at it and studied the photo. After a minute he said to me, ‘I’m startled that out of so much pain, there is beauty.’”

Dr. King’s eloquence and thoughtfulness left a deep impression on Adelman. “King was a deeply spiritual person and a personalist; he would give anyone he was talking to his undivided attention,” Adelman remembers.

The series of marches — beginning with Bloody Sunday, continuing with Turnaround Tuesday, and ending with the march to Montgomery — were planned and orchestrated by the SNCC. The first consisted of violent encounters with a racist police force armed with bullwhips and tear gas. President Lyndon Johnson was hoping to use the violence and its effect on the nation to push voting rights legislation through the Congress.

Martin Luther King had meetings with the President where the objectives of the civil rights movement were discussed. “Lyndon and Doc had an understanding that it was up to Doc to create drama to lead to the Voting Rights Act,” Adelman feels. “They were collaborators.” Robert Caro, the award-winning author and beloved LBJ biographer, has a similar assessment. 

In a 2013 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, Caro said that

 “Johnson always wanted to meet with people one-on-one.” He recounted an instance when civil rights leader Roy Wilkins went in to Johnson’s office for a meeting and Johnson pulled up almost knee-to-knee with Wilkins, leaned into his face — a famed LBJ tactic — and assured him he wanted major civil rights victories.

President Johnson called a special session of Congress and began a 45-minute speech in support of the Voting Rights Act, one of the great moments in presidential oratory

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. …

At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.

There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. …

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans not as Democrats or Republicans; we are met here as Americans to solve that problem. …

Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America: It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight.

It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great president of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact. A century has passed — more than a hundred years — since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal. …

The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.

For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror? …

This is the richest, most powerful country which ever occupied this globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours.

But I do not want to be the president who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion. … I want to be the president who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.

It was a miraculous conversion, considering Johnson’s early congressional voting record. For 20 years while representing Texas in Congress, Johnson consistently voted against civil rights legislation — even anti-lynching bills — and though his championing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a departure from his congressional self, it was, perhaps, a return to the idealism of his young adulthood.

When Lyndon Johnson was a poor student in San Marcos, Texas, he dropped out between his second and third year of college because he needed money. Twenty years old, Johnson became a teacher to the sons and daughters of field hands and farmers in Cotulla, Texas, a dusty small town about 60 miles north of the Mexican border. He taught these Mexican-American children — all of ragged poverty — how to read and write. Before and after the school day, he taught English to the school’s janitor, a man named Tomas Coronado.

The experience never left Johnson, even if he hid it during his tenure on Capitol Hill. Caro feels that LBJ concealed this part of himself during his decades in Congress, but that it reemerged once Johnson had the chance to truly make a difference. “When ambition and compassion were both pointing in the same direction,” argues Caro, “he was a force that was unlike anything else in American history.”

WHAT DOES ALL OF THIS AMOUNT TO, 50 YEARS ON?

 The civil rights struggles of yesteryear were certainly successes in their own times, enfranchising millions of black Americans, drastically reducing poverty and inequality, ending Jim Crow as they knew it. But after decades of marches and unrest, decades of blood and tears, hope and rage, thwarted ambitions and shattered lives, what has it all amounted to when many Americans need to be reminded that black lives matter? As Johnson said, it is not a Southern or Northern problem, it is an American problem — yet there’s seemingly no consensus on that fact, let alone the mental toughness or physical desire to fix it.

Yet, perhaps the past can offer hope. Fifty years ago, after a divisive black leader was murdered in New York, after a group of peaceful demonstrators in Alabama were beaten by those sworn to uphold the law — a visual plea to the conscience of the American people — a white man of Southern birth addressed a room filled with powerful white men from around the nation. He told them about teaching young Mexican-American students in Cotulla, how even as children they faced prejudice, and how you can never forget what “hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.” He told them that change was coming, asked them to join in easing its passage.

And though he wouldn’t end war among the brothers of this Earth, he promised to try.

Updated: on April 30, 2015, changes to the Malcolm X section were made at the author’s request.

Screen Shot 2015-03-29 at 2.14.57 AM.png

With the murder of Malcolm X, the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965 was a pivotal year in American history. What lessons does it hold for America in 2015?

A Great War Among the Brothers of This Earth

. It remains, in many ways, the perfect summation of the year that helped inspire DeLillo’s book: 1989.

college students overtook Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in a rally for democracy

; thousands were killed as the government crushed the demonstration. In the fall and winter, the Berlin Wall fell; communist rule ended in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania; and nationalist movements in the Baltics were both literally and figuratively chipping away at the Soviet Union. 

, Greece, and South Africa all witnessed the election of reformist governments. A British scientist invented the World Wide Web, the first GPS satellite was launched, and an American company offered the public a dial-up Internet connection for the first time. For millions around the world, the events of 1989 seemed to open a road into an unknown but hope-filled future.

For New York City, the 365 days of 1989 were a curved bridge taken too fast from the violence of the 1970s to the prosperity of the 1990s. Gentrification acted like napalm on minority neighborhoods: clinging to whatever it touched, impossible to wipe away, igniting fires that burned fast and hot and often lethal. The haves and have-nots lived in uncomfortable proximity. Crime ran the streets of neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Red Hook and Manhattan’s Harlem, fueled by cash, guns, and crack — the cheap, dangerous drug that had arrived a few years earlier and devoured the urban core. 

On an average day in 1989, New York suffered five murders, nine rapes, and 194 aggravated assaults

1989 in New York was a curved bridge taken too fast from the violence of the 1970s to the prosperity of the 1990s

For the City of New York, three events defined 1989, exposing the knotted ligaments of race, justice, crime, and power.

On April 19, a white female was assaulted and raped during a nighttime jog through Central Park. Five teenage males — all black or Latino, all from Harlem, all between the ages of 14 and 16 — were arrested, charged with, and convicted of the crime.

On August 23, a 16-year-old African American male was shot to death after being attacked by a crush of white youths in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

And on November 7, the city of New York elected its first (and to this date, only) African American mayor.

 in April 1989 spoke volumes about how the media covered crime in the city.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, a 38-year-old black woman was approached on the street by two men. At knifepoint, they forced her up to the roof of a four-story building, where they raped and beat her before throwing her 50 feet to the street below. She suffered two broken ankles, a fractured right leg, and abdominal injuries.

That same night, in Central Park, a 28-year-old white woman was jogging when she was violently assaulted — dragged off the running path, raped, and severely beaten. Her skull was fractured, and she almost died from blood loss. Days later, when she awoke from her coma, she had no memory of the attack nor of any events in the hour immediately before the assault.

The first story was a brief flicker in the local, violence-loaded 35-cent tabloids. The latter became a national story, splattered across front pages for weeks, and introduced a new word — “wilding” — into the lexicon. New York City Mayor Ed Koch declared it “the crime of the century.”

The brutal attack on Trisha Meili — the Central Park jogger — came to epitomize the fears of New Yorkers. The case, trial, and convictions were followed closely because the urbanites were afraid. Afraid to travel. Afraid to go to the park. Afraid to make their daily commutes. Afraid to live in New York. They needed someone to blame; they found what they were looking for in five young men whose names became synonymous with the city’s fear. The world came to know them as the “Central Park Five.”

The media depicted Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise as violent, nihilistic teens. They were accused of being a part of a larger group of around 30 teenagers who were “wilding” — “street slang for going berzerk,” as one New York 

 headline defined it — in Central Park on the night of April 19, 1989. The press called the boys a “wolf pack,” and accused them of a dozen assaults in the park before their attack on Meili.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) was under tremendous pressure to close the case. Veteran detectives used well-worn techniques to mislead the young suspects and convince them to confess. After interrogating each of the teens separately for more than 14 hours, police turned on video cameras and taped the confessions. The defendants’ taped statements contained inconsistencies with each other and inconsistencies with the clues present at the scene. No physical evidence ever linked any of the accused to the crime.

None of that mattered. The court of public opinion reached a verdict before the criminal trials even began, and the justice system soon concurred. The five young men were found guilty. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana were sentenced to five to ten years in prison; Korey Wise, age 16, was tried as an adult and sentenced to five to fifteen years.

In the weeks and months after the brutal rape, a media frenzy erupted. The case was prosecuted quickly and — in the minds of scared city residents — the police did their jobs. They had put the right people away.

The problem? The Central Park Five were innocent.

Two days after the attack in Central Park, the normally outspoken Mayor Koch released a statement. “I think that everybody here — maybe across the nation — will look at this case to see how the criminal system works,” he said. “How will this be handled? This is, I think, putting the criminal justice system on trial.”

From that day until today, the answer is the same: the criminal justice system was guilty. It failed by every measure. It failed Antron, Kevin, Yusef, Raymond, and Korey. It failed Trisha Meili. It failed — tragically so — the other victims of the real rapist, Matias Reyes.

On June 14, 1989 — two months after the Central Park jogger attack, with the criminal justice system still focused on five innocent teens — 

Matias Reyes raped and murdered Lourdes Gonzalez

, a pregnant mother of three. He stabbed her nine times as she begged him not to hurt her children, who listened to their mother’s screams from a different room in the apartment. Two months later, on August 5, 

 by an apartment building’s porter as he fled yet another crime scene, one of at least three rapes he committed between the Central Park attack and when he was finally apprehended.

Though Reyes had been identified as a suspect in a rape two days before he attacked Trisha Meili on her evening jog, no detective ever questioned him about the jogger attack. 

He wouldn’t be connected to it until May 2002, when he confessed to the crime

 — an admission of guilt that was prompted by a run-in between Reyes and Korey Wise in prison earlier that year. 

, the convictions of the Central Park Five were overturned.

If this case was, as Mayor Koch said, “putting the criminal justice system on trial,” then there is no question: beyond any reasonable doubt, the prosecution, the police, and the press had failed the city. “The Central Park case will be one of the most important criminal cases in the history of the United States,” says Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of history at New York University. “The narrative of young black men being predators fit society’s preconceptions. It exposed the huge imperfections of the criminal justice system.”

Although much of the mainstream media regurgitated the preconceptions that had led to the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five, others voiced their dissent — loudly.

, released in June 1989, tells the story of stewing racial tensions in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The film’s opening credits explode on to the screen with a tempest of a dance number set to “Fight the Power,” the newly released anthem by rap group Public Enemy. It was a call to action — “our freedom of speech is freedom or death, we got to fight the powers that be” — 

as Public Enemy frontman Chuck D demanded that people open their eyes

 to the racism around them and push back against it.

The film takes place over one scorching summer day, following more than a dozen characters — black, white, Puerto Rican, Korean, old, young, male, female, intellectually disabled — in Bed-Stuy as their lives repeatedly collide, with harmonious and hateful results. As the day wears on and tensions rise, Sal (the Italian-American owner of a local pizza joint) snaps, hurls a racial epithet, and provokes a brawl. The police are called, try to quell the fighting by force, and in so doing strangle to death Radio Raheem, a young black man known for his suitcase-sized boombox. A riot ensues. In the end, Sal’s pizza shop is burned to the ground, and we’re left to answer who, if anyone, did the right thing.

The movie was controversial, commercially successful, and went on to become one of the most critically acclaimed films of its era. Years later, it was selected in its first year of eligibility for the 

Library of Congress’s National Film Registry

. A young Barack Obama took Michelle Robinson to see the film on their first date. “

 still holds up a mirror to our society, and it makes us laugh and think and challenges all of us to see ourselves in one another,” 

said President Obama in a video message created for the film’s 25th anniversary.

In June 2014, after a screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, director Spike Lee discussed the making of the film and its lasting impact. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and a grandson of longtime Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, remarked that Spike Lee was reflecting the world around him. “Howard Beach. Yusef Hawkins. It’s Bensonhurst. It’s Mayor Ed Koch,” Lee replied. “Eleanor Bumpurs. Go on down the line. Michael Stewart. A lot of stuff was happening at the time in New York City.”

THREE WEEKS AFTER MATIAS REYES WAS BROUGHT INTO CUSTODY

 in August 1989, a different mob attack would grab the city’s attention — one perpetrated by a gang of roughly 30 white youths against a defenseless black teenager. Nobody called them a “wolfpack.” Nobody referred to it as “wilding.”

On August 23, Yusef Hawkins, a black 16-year-old, and three friends took the N train into Bensonhurst, a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn. Hawkins came to meet the owner of a 1982 Pontiac. Yusef was hoping to purchase it for $900.

“This is a closed, insular world, this enclave in Brooklyn … a world of tightknit families and fear and hostility toward the outside,” 

. A place “where the young men … grow up with a macho code.”

Throughout the day on August 23, rumors ricocheted through Bensonhurst, and innuendos quickly became imminent threats — that a neighborhood white girl was dating a black teenager, that she was inviting black and Latino boys to the neighborhood for her 18th birthday party that night, that a group of black teenagers was coming to beat up a white kid from Bensonhurst, that this neighborhood girl needed someone (or the whole community) to protect her honor.

As Yusef Hawkins and his friends searched for the address from the used car listing, they came across a mob of 30 or so angry white youths. “What are you niggers doing here?” shouted someone in the crowd. The white teens surrounded Hawkins and his friends. Some carried baseball bats. At least one carried a gun. Hawkins was holding a half-eaten Snickers bar.

Yusef Hawkins, trapped in a Bensonhurst doorway, was shot in the chest by a .32-caliber revolver. Two bullets cut through his heart. He slumped to the ground.

The white youths scattered. Eight of them eventually came to face charges, but Joseph Fama, age 18, and Keith Mondello, 19, were identified as the leaders of the mob, 

Nobody called them a “wolfpack.” Nobody referred to it as “wilding.”

Hawkins’ murder was the latest in a long string of racially tinged deaths in New York City: 

, pulled out of a car and beaten to death in Gravesend; 

, mysteriously dead from asphyxiation while in police custody for scrawling graffiti on the wall of the First Avenue L subway station; 

, a 66-year-old woman with severe mental health issues, shot twice by police as they tried to subdue her during an attempted eviction; 

, killed when he was struck by a car on Shore Parkway as he fled assault by a mob of 10 white men in Howard Beach, Queens.

Three days after Yusef Hawkins’s death, 300 black demonstrators marched through the streets of Bensonhurst. Neighborhood residents cursed and spat upon the protesters, hitting them with food. Some locals held watermelons. Organized shouts retched forward from the crowd, and the taunts varied: “niggers go home” or “useless” (a play on the victim’s name) or “Central Park, Central Park.”

Brooklyn native Reverend Al Sharpton, who organized the march, emerged as the controversial voice for the disenfranchised. He led demonstrations throughout the city, demanding justice while earning substantial coverage from a rapt media. 

Mayor Koch, meanwhile, condemned Sharpton’s protest in Bensonhurst

: “It’s just as wrong to march into Bensonhurst as it would be to march into Harlem after that young woman in the jogging case.” Koch’s statement — which seemed to suggest that the comfort of whites in Bensonhurst trumped the need to memorialize Yusef Hawkins and protest his brutal murder — understandably enraged many in the city’s African-American population.

Amidst the controversy, Sharpton emerged as something of a spokesman for Hawkins’s family. Though few figures were as polarizing as 1989’s Al Sharpton, his interactions with the family seem more genuine than those of many other leaders. (In 1991, Sharpton would be stabbed by a white, drunk Bensonhurst male resident en route to another march through Bensonhurst in memory of Yusef Hawkins.)

Whereas Koch’s response to the protests looked at the murder through the unsympathetic prism of the feelings of Bensonhurst’s white population, Reverend Jesse Jackson’s response was arguably worse. With the forthcoming Democratic primary contest between Mayor Koch and his black challenger David Dinkins occupying a significant portion of the media’s attention, the New York 

 (among other outlets) reported that, while Sharpton was sitting with the grieving parents at their son’s wake, Jackson approached them and said, motioning to the casket, “That boy lying in there could make David Dinkins the next mayor.” Moses Stewart, Yusef Hawkins’ father, flew into a rage. Though Jackson’s office later denied using those words, Stewart confirmed the story to reporters.

On Election Day, Moses Stewart stayed home. “It won’t make any difference,” he told 

A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE MURDER OF YUSEF HAWKINS

, David Dinkins, the sitting Manhattan borough president, defeated three-term incumbent Ed Koch in the Democratic mayoral primary on his way to becoming New York City’s first black mayor.

From the start of the campaign, Dinkins portrayed himself as a salve for the city’s racial wounds — “a man of hope and healing,” 

as Jesse Jackson called him at a campaign rally

. “I am running because our city has become sharply polarized,” 

Dinkins told his supporters at his announcement speech in February 1989

. “We need a mayor who can transcend differences so we can work together to solve our problems.” Mayor Koch, by contrast, was painted as a man who, if not the source of the city’s worsening racial dynamics, was either unable or unwilling to take the issue seriously. “For every New York program and every New York pain,” 

, “[Koch] has a joke, a wisecrack, a one-liner.”

“African Americans had more of a governmental voice in D.C. than in New York City,” says New York University professor Jonathan Zimmerman. “Harlem was the basis of political power. African Americans didn’t have the dominance in population like in other American cities. Philadelphia, Cleveland, D.C., and others had large black populations and a history of black mayors by that time. New York doesn’t have the concentration.”

Lacking a demographic edge, there were two major factors in Dinkins’ mayoral win: a Democratic establishment severely weakened by corruption scandals, and the successful fusion of a diverse array of voters. “Although few realized this at the time, Dinkins benefited most from the 1986 criminal indictment and prosecution … of Democratic political leaders in the Bronx and Queens,” 

wrote J. Phillip Thompson in his 1990 analysis of the Dinkins election

. The rat-a-tat of prosecutions — which, as fate would have it, were led by U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, Dinkins’s future opponent in the 1989 and 1993 mayoral elections — took down three congressmen and one borough president.

For Mayor Koch, the political damage was almost incalculable. The machinery of the Democratic establishment — so instrumental in securing his three terms in office — was self-destructing, and the public increasingly saw Koch as complicit in the corruption. Black and Latino politicos, free from the bonds of political patronage and newly able to speak out without the fear of retribution, stepped in to fill the party’s power vacuum, hammering the mayor over the city’s ongoing racial tensions. In 1988, the Black-Latino-Labor alliance delivered a crushing blow to Koch with Jesse Jackson’s victory in New York City’s 1988 presidential primaries. “Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign [was a] testing ground for the 1989 Dinkins mayoral candidacy,” 

. “Given that a black or Latino candidate had never won a citywide election in New York City, Jackson’s victory was widely perceived as a momentous gain for black New Yorkers.”

To become mayor in 1989, Dinkins would have to unseat an incumbent three-term mayor in a primary. Then he would advance to a general election campaign against Rudy Giuliani, the charismatic federal prosecutor known for his enormously high conviction rate and success against high-profile criminals like mafia kingpin John Gotti. Giuliani had the support of both the Republican and Liberal parties, and Dinkins knew that his own victory could not be won solely on the back of the city’s new Democratic coalition. He had to appeal to the city’s white and Jewish voters without alienating the black supporters who were enraged by the city’s racial violence. He denounced controversial Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan for anti-Semitism. He used Jesse Jackson at campaign rallies, but was careful to distance himself from the reverend in other areas. He urged calm after the brutal murder of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, but demanded swift prosecutions for those responsible. He said the Central Park Five were guilty of “

,” and that harsh penalties needed to be doled out immediately. His positions were an indication of the political and social strains that the events of 1989 had put on the city and its residents.

Dinkins handily defeated Koch in the September primary. 

Exit polls showed he won 9 in 10 black voters

; picked up about one-third of white voters (twice the support that they had given to Jesse Jackson one year earlier); and kept the margins small in Koch strongholds such as Staten Island and Manhattan’s West Side. His appeal as 

 candidate for racial harmony worked: 6 in 10 white voters thought he would be fair to both blacks and whites, 

while 7 in 10 black voters believed that Mayor Koch gave preferential treatment to whites

Though Dinkins proved victorious in the general election, in the November mayoral election he defeated Giuliani by only three percentage points. “Two-thirds of the whites and 9 of 10 blacks voted for a candidate of their own race,” 

 It was among the closest New York mayoral races in a century.

The election of David Dinkins set into motion the defining dynamic of the next two decades of mayoral politics in the city: As black and Latino leaders rose in the Democratic Party, white ethnic New Yorkers fled it. 

Roughly 60 percent of Koch’s primary voters defected to Giuliani in the general election

. Bensonhurst, where Dinkins had been so careful to urge calm, went to Giuliani by a 10 to 1 margin.

“I know that your faith in me is not going to fade away,” 

Giuliani told his supporters on election night

. “I assure you, I’m not going to fade away.”

Four years later, David Dinkins lost reelection to Rudy Giuliani. He would be the last Democratic mayor in New York City for 20 years.

, a 43-year-old black man and resident of Staten Island, was approached by two plainclothes NYPD officers who questioned him about selling “looseys” — untaxed cigarettes. The confrontation between Garner and the police escalated until Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Garner in a chokehold and three other officers helped take Garner to the ground. Garner died.

Spike Lee tweeted out a link to a video titled “Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant.”

 It mixes the footage of Garner’s death with footage from the death of Radio Raheem in 

. The similarities are eerie. Contrasted with the scenes of Radio Raheem losing his struggle against a police officer’s chokehold are Garner’s screams: “I’m minding my business, please just leave me alone!” After he’s forced to the ground, Garner gargles and cries, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! Get off of me! Get off of me!”

New Yorkers, then and now, hold onto the hope that times have changed, but we have to consider the possibility that while much has changed, for many New Yorkers — particularly in less-affluent or minority neighborhoods — change has been slow to come, and when it has, it hasn’t always meant improvement.

FAST-FORWARD A QUARTER-CENTURY FROM 1989.

 Raymond Santana — sentenced at age 14 for a crime that he and the other members of the Central Park Five didn’t commit — and I sit on a warped wooden bench on a hot July night in Bryant Park, the green blip in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. The cheers of World Cup fans and laughter of children fills the air around us.

“It’s hard not to think about how it happened 25 years ago,” he says. Santana is now 39. He wears athletic shorts and a gray shirt, having just come from a gym. He has a goatee, but still comes across as incredibly youthful — and sincere.

“Would you ever leave this city?” I ask.

Raymond Santana is a proud man — fearless, well-read, tireless — who has rebuilt his life with quiet dignity. He’s also a victim — of racism, of media sensationalism, of the criminal justice system. A victim in every way.

“No. I couldn’t leave,” he says. “It was a battle. I had to stay. I had to fight by telling my story. By doing 

the movie with Ken [Burns] and David [McMahon]

. Getting the Central Park Five story out there — the real story — was all due to the book, the film, by going out to speak to kids.”

On our way to the park from the Midtown gym where he used to work as a personal trainer, we run into friends and supporters congratulating him on 

the $40 million settlement that the city agreed to pay to the Central Park Five

“Raymond! I’m so happy for you,” says a smiling man as we leave to go down the street.

A middle-aged woman stops and practically knocks him over. “Raymond!” she says, beaming. “You deserve every penny. I had no idea that happened to you. Congratulations!”

You can see that he’s happy. The crowds that greet him are no longer angry. They welcome him.

He is no longer infamous. He is no longer anonymous. He isn’t alone.

He will never leave the city, and New York will never leave him.

Follow him on Twitter at @garrettpmcgrath

LOVEHATEGold1.jpg

Three events defined 1989 in NYC: the Central Park jogger attack, the murder of Yusef Hawkins, and the election of the city's first (and only) black mayor.

Garrett McGrath